Sweet Home: March 2011
Going Out With A Bang
Nellie “Tiger” Travis boasts all the requirements for the perfect blues pedigree. She was born in Mississippi. Growing up, she sang in her church choir.
Appearing: Friday, March 11th at B.L.U.E.S. and Friday, the 18th at Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago.
She listened to a steady diet of classic gospel and country music. Such is the power of her voice that Purvis “The Blues Man” Spann declared her the new queen of the blues after Koko Taylor passed away. All very fitting, except when you discover that Travis never actually listened to the blues until she was a young adult, and only started singing it after she had established a career performing R&B.
“I started singing in church at 5-years old,” says Travis. “All my uncles were gospel singers and my grandmother, who raised me, was an evangelist. She was against anything other than gospel. I heard snatches of blues at other people’s houses, but I didn’t get to really listen to blues until I was a young adult.”
So it’s no wonder that Travis spent the beginning of her career singing Southern soul and R&B; despite growing up in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the blues was not on her radar. She was the star of many school programs, singing the gospel standard “My Precious Lord” so many times that she can’t stand to hear it to this day. Still, that gospel training serves as the solid foundation for her current blues vocals, which simmer with soul-moving vibrato and signature shouts and growls.
Her new album, I’m Going Out Tonight (Benevolent Blues), is the first all-blues CD that Travis has released in her 22-year career. The 10 tracks represent the journey the singer has traveled: from gospel to R&B to blues; from Mississippi to Los Angeles to Chicago. That she penned six of them reflects the power of a contemporary blues woman. The title track is a sexy, slow burner that proclaims, “I’m going out tonight/to have myself some fun/if you ain’t with it/then I guess you ain’t the one!” On the funked-up blues anthem of “Tornado Wrapped In Fire,” Travis makes her dominance even clearer: “I’m not the girl I used to be/I reached out for something higher/in your eyes I was once a low flame/now I’m a tornado wrapped in fire.” Tunes like these illustrate the attitude and the growling sensuality that earned her the nickname, “Tiger.”
“I’m daring and I take charge — that’s what tigers do,” she says. “The only difference is that I don’t eat people.” Her cousin gave her the moniker when she realized that, like her musical influences Big Mama Thornton and Big Time Sarah, blues women have nicknames. But she is adamant about the version used, eschewing Tigress or anything that denotes less power. “Tiger can be male or female and it’s not ‘The Tiger,’ it’s just ‘Tiger.'”
With bright blond hair and a penchant for layering white or animal prints against her smooth mahogany skin, Travis definitely looks the part of the take-charge blues diva. But it wasn’t too long ago that she was a “green” Mississippi girl who didn’t know even one blues song. She sang lead in the Southern-soul group Ssipp (for Mississippi) once she graduated from high school, touring the South during the mid-’80s. In 1987, she left the Deep South for L.A., hoping to realize her dream of becoming an R&B star.
“I left Mississippi with the attitude that I was going to L.A. and if I had to, sleep on Quincy Jones’ doorstep until he heard me.”
It didn’t quite happen like that. Sheltered and naïve, she encountered many industry people eager to take advantage of her. Once she auditioned for the remake of The Marvelettes, hoping it would be her big break. “The guy told me to turn around, which I thought was strange. Then he left the room for a long time and when I went into the hallway to find him, he came out of a room and I saw three white women lined up naked against the wall. He propositioned me and I said no. All I could hear was my grandmother in my head, saying you can always come back to church.”
Travis slowly built a following singing with different L.A.-based R&B bands, but she still worked a day job, doing data entry or working in a convalescent home for steady income. It wasn’t until she moved to Chicago in 1992, that she decided to sing full-time and that all her material would be the blues.
“I came to Chicago to take care of my mother because she was sick. I never planned to stay,” she explains. But fate stepped in as soon as she entered Kingston Mines one night. “I sat in with Howard Scott‘s band. I didn’t know any blues songs so I sang ‘Proud Mary.’ They hired me the same night to play with LV Banks the following week.” Travis had to quickly gain some blues knowledge so she devised her own curriculum.
“After Kingston Mines hired me, I went out to listen to bands every night. I sang the songs they sang [like] ‘Sweet Home,’ ‘Mustang Sally’; I learned the style. I just never had thought about the blues before, I had been doing R&B.” Recalling the injustices that she witnessed back home, Travis realized that she had actually been groomed for the blues all along. “I grew up with the blues, I just didn’t know I had it!”
She later honed her style by listening to local singers like Melvia “Chick” Rogers and Big Time Sarah, but her ultimate influence was from the Queen Of The Blues herself. “In 1997, I was singing at Koko Taylor‘s banquet hall on New Year’s Eve and my mom was videotaping me. She had a massive aneurysm and dropped dead at my feet. Koko took me under her wing. She was like another mother to me.”
You can hear echoes of Taylor in Travis’ low, raspy delivery and her confident stage performance. After 19 years of singing the blues, she has fully embraced the genre, even in her relationships. Her husband Tim Austin is Buddy Guy‘s drummer and she regularly hosts blues icons in her home. She takes the title of “New Queen Of The Blues” very seriously. “I had a prominent person give me that title and I’m going to wear it well.”
— Rosalind Cummings-Yeates
Category: Columns, Monthly, Sweet Home
